"Corendi's aesthetic."

"Okay! Then I will be Corendi for a couple of decades. Do you want to roll too?"

"Sure." Roll.

He gets Dunari and Ellehar and Yulane.

"Ellehar's all right."

"All right. Nice to, uh, know a name of yours."

"I'd call it a pseudonym. I guess people who spend enough time around each other over a long enough time usually just tolerate some entanglement? Does it accrue to made-up names like this in those cases or does it wind up sticking to - I don't seem to have any pet names in this language, a lot of them in English are desserts but that's probably not what faeries do."

" - both. People usually think of that as romantic, the fact that as you get to know someone and have names for each other and names you've known each other by you get entangled."

"That makes sense."

"Entanglement is in one sense always a disadvantage but also when there's enough of it you stop tracking debt between you and just - reason, strategically, as one entity from a debt and entanglement perspective - and that's nice. I think. It seems like it would be."

"Compared to not having to deal with it at all or just in the environment where you do?"

"Not compared to not having to deal with it at all, that'd definitely be nicer."

"I could draw analogies to things humans do. Like, in some legal contexts the function of marriage is substantially performing the function of making it more inconvenient to break up."

"Huh. And that's meant as a romantic gesture?"

"I don't think I'd say gesture. But it's a romantic commitment thing."

"That makes sense. Probably the human version doesn't even give both sides the permanent option of slowly killing each other!"

"Not via magic, though there are unfortunate jokes about it being debilitating to be in an unhappy marriage!"

"Huh! - some of the stories in that book are about bad ends to relationships."

"I guess that stands to reason."

Sigh. "But perhaps we can get to them some other day?"

"I'm not in a tearing hurry. Oh, I looked up somebody who wrote things and is going to be born soon. Someone will need to learn Latin to read what he wrote and travel to Italy to supervise his being born in order to test the hypothesis that people might be indebted for things they read by humans who have not been born yet. And then they can surreptitiously vaccinate him against something he is not recorded to have ever had, perhaps, to pay it back if it turns out they are."

"Do you know Latin?"

"I read it. I didn't get the language from someone with an authentic understanding of its pronunciation."

"I bet my brother would be delighted if you were to teach him Latin in exchange for the travel to Italy and all as a favor to you."

"I expect I can correctly guess which brother!"